Prodigal Summer was published by HarperCollins in 2000. Three narratives, set in the same southern Appalachian community during a single summer, interweave without their characters meeting until the final pages.
Deanna Wolfe is a wildlife biologist living alone in a Forest Service cabin, studying the return of coyotes to the mountains. A young hunter arrives — Eddie Bondo, who has come to kill the coyotes. Their sexual and intellectual collision drives one strand. Lusa Maluf Landowski is a young entomologist from Lexington who married a tobacco farmer and was widowed within two years; she must decide whether to sell the farm or transform it. Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley are elderly neighbors who argue across a fence about organic versus chemical farming — he sprays pesticides on his chestnut trees; she raises organic apples and considers his chemicals an assault on her land.
The novel is Kingsolver’s most explicitly ecological work: every narrative thread demonstrates how species are connected — how removing predators causes cascading effects, how pesticides travel through food webs, how monoculture farming destroys the biological diversity that sustains agriculture.
Collecting Prodigal Summer
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2000): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first: $50–$100